Now reading | We Know How You Feel, by Affi Khatchadourian
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/know-feel
Technology and science are awesome. If I were not such a serial entrepreneur, I would run off today and get my Ph.D. in branding and the physiological role our brains play in our rational and emotional choices. I am infatuated with the data, the research and the intelligent minds who are playing in this space every day. It is the future of our industry. I believe this to be true.
The article that I was reading today is all about companies like Affectiva run by Egyptian scientist, Rana el Kaliouby. Affectiva is focusing on technology that can predict behavior based on reading facial expressions and emotions.
Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say, and a few pioneers dedicated to decoding this information have made tremendous progress.
How does it work?
The human face is a moving landscape of tremendous nuance and complexity. It is a marvel of computation that people so often effortlessly interpret expressions, regardless of the particularities of the face they are looking at, the setting, the light, or the angle. A programmer trying to teach a computer to do the same thing must contend with nearly infinite contingencies. The process requires machine learning, in which computers find patterns in large tranches of data, and then use those patterns to interpret new data.
Even though they stress that this technology can read expressions, not minds, it is incredible what it is able to predict based on research and testing.
The potential applications are vast. CBS uses the software at its Las Vegas laboratory, Television City, where it tests new shows. During the 2012 Presidential elections, Kaliouby’s team used Affdex to track more than two hundred people watching clips of the Obama-Romney debates, and concluded that the software was able to predict voting preference with seventy-three-per-cent accuracy. Affectiva is working with a Skype competitor, Oovoo, to integrate it into video calls. “People are doing more and more videoconferencing, but all this data is not captured in an analytic way,” she told me. Capturing analytics, it turns out, means using the software—say, during a business negotiation—to determine what the person on the other end of the call is not telling you. “The technology will say, ‘O.K., Mr. Whatever is showing signs of engagement—or he just smirked, and that means he was not persuaded.’ ”
The future is bright and exciting:
Kaliouby doesn’t see herself returning to autism work, but she has not relinquished the idea of a dual bottom line. “I do believe that if we have information about your emotional experiences we can help you be in a more positive mood and influence your wellness,” she said. She had been reading about how to deal with difficult experiences. “The consistent advice was you have to take care of yourself, be in a good place, so that you can handle everything else,” she said. “I think there is an opportunity to build a very, very simple app that pushes out funny content or inspiring content three times a day.” Her tone brightened, as she began looking to wider possibilities. “It can capture the content’s effect on you, and then you can gain these points—these happiness points, or mood points, or rewards—that can be turned into a virtual currency. We have been in conversations with a company in that space. It is an advertising-rewards company, and its business is based on positive moments. So if you set a goal to run three miles and you run three miles, that’s a moment. Or if you set the alarm for six o’clock and you actually do get up, that’s a moment. And they monetize these moments. They sell them. Like Kleenex can send you a coupon—I don’t know—when you get over a sad moment. Right now, this company is making assumptions about what those moments are. And we’re like, ‘Guess what? We can capture them.’ ”
